RAIN

Before everybody got swimming pools — as we did, and I was in the water constantly from June to the middle of September — we used to get together on a Saturday in the summer, with Grandpa and Grandma and all the aunts and uncles and cousins on my mother’s side of the family (17 cousins at the time), to “go to the lake.” Now, that wasn’t any particular body of water we meant by the lake. It meant that we’d choose some lake or other, where we spent the day swimming, playing ball, tossing horseshoes, eating hamburgers from the grill and drinking sodas from A-Treat with flavors you can’t get anymore, from about noon till dusk. Since everybody but the in-laws was at least half Italian (in my family, we were 100%), nobody worried about sunscreen, and we were all brown as berries. It was a grand time, but it had to be sunny, because if there was the least hint of our Word of the Week, rain, Aunt Irene or Aunt Peggy or Aunt Marie would say she couldn’t go, and we’d have to wait another seven days, and hope that more rain or something else didn’t get in the way.

When you’re a kid and you don’t live on a farm, you think of rain as the spoil-sport from the sky, especially if you played or coached baseball, or worked as an umpire, and I did one or the other of those things for a long time. “You think we can get this game in?” one of the coaches might ask me, as I looked at the sky and the wet but playable field, with a temporary lull in the rainfall. “Let’s try, anyhow,” I’d answer, so long as there was no flash of lightning anywhere, not even from miles away. You didn’t take chances with that, even before the bats were made of aluminum. And what about school? From third to eighth grade, I walked to school with my sister and then with her and my brother too — I was in high school by the time my youngest sister was in first grade. So if it rained, we walked the half mile under umbrellas. Everybody had them. You’d shake the rain off them just as you got into the church, which was where we gathered before the classes began. All the boys had black umbrellas. What color the girls had, I don’t remember. But in those days, because people were out in the rain so often, we wore boots or rubbers you pulled on over your shoes. After all, those shoes were leather, and you didn’t want to get them soaked.

Sometimes, though, the rain would drizzle down even though the sun was out, and then we paid it no mind. “It’s just a sun-shower!” we’d say, and we’d keep on playing. Then you might see it as it hit the warm blacktop of the street, making a fine mist in the sun. Of course, it was one thing to be a kid and to get a bit wet in the rain. Even if you did get soaked, you could go home and change into dry clothes. But when a shaggy dog got wet in the rain — we had a couple of collies — that was another matter. Somehow it brought out all the rank dog-smells in dog-dander and dog-flesh, and you also didn’t know when, all of a sudden, the dog would give himself a shake and spatter his own small storm of raindrops all over the kitchen.

Rain is important in Scripture, as I’m sure you know. It doesn’t rain a whole lot in the Jordan valley, so people had to be careful about it, collecting it in cisterns, and digging wells — sometimes coming to blows over wells, in fact — and sending rain-water in furrows to moisten the earth you had plowed and sown with seed. So when Jesus says that the Father “makes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust,” it isn’t to say, as in English, that into each life a little rain must fall. The rain is a blessing: as when God rained down manna for them for food in the dry wilderness. “Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain,” pleads the poet Hopkins. And really, rain is a kind of miracle. There’s just the slightest electrical difference between one side of a water molecule and the other, and it’s that charge that causes water to bead up in raindrops if there’s a speck of dust for the water to cling to. Without raindrops, I don’t know if life on earth would be possible. Also, it seems that mineral-molecules from the sands of the Sahara desert get swept into the atmosphere, so that when the Atlantic brings rain to South America, it’s rain that’s been seeded with nourishment

“A Rainy Day in Boston,” Childe Hassam. Public Domain.

.Where does our word rain come from? Outside of the Germanic languages, we aren’t sure. English rain is the same as German Regen, but in German that g sound between the front-of-the-mouth vowels stayed as g and didn’t turn into a hard y and then the ee sound we spell with the letter i in rain and sail (German Segel) and hail (German Hegel) and many, many more. The Germanic word might come from the same root that gives us Latin rigare, to moisten, and it sure sounds plausible, except that the Latin g in there should correspond with a Germanic c (k), and there isn’t any. The Romance languages take their word for rain from Latin pluvium: and in fact one of the names the ancient Roman farmers gave to their chief god was Iuppiter Pluvius, which means, believe it or not, the Sky-Father who sends down rain. Is pluvium a cousin of any Germanic words? Sure. But not with any that begin with p. Those prehistoric p’s became Germanic f’s. Hence the cousins that have to do with the smooth motion of or in a liquid: flow, float, fly.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!